Sponsorship of a Season/Show-High School

[maccor]

Just wondering if any high schools out there have had any success 'selling' sponsorship of their season or individual shows? We have a local company sponsor all of our show posters for the year, and I'd like to try and get other companies to 'sponsor' our shows. If you have been successful, what have been keys to your success? How much is 'too much' to ask? I'd especially like to hear from high schools.

Thanks,

Mike

[jowens]

Hi There,
We have just finished our High School's production of Thoroughly Modern Millie, for which I am the director.
We are lucky enough to be in a fairly commercial area and have had a lot of success with garnering support from local businesses... A few ideas:
1 - Sell ads in your program. We sold $25 for business card size, $45 half page, $85 Full Page, and pulled in close to $1k doing that.
2 - Local Chamber of Commerce or Kiwanis club. The Kiwanis club is focused on helping children. Often times this is where the local business owners get together and figure out ways to do this. Become friends with someone in Kiwanis (offer to have your kids perform a song or scene at one of their meetings). During last years production of Les Mis, by simply drafting a well written letter, we were able to get around $5k from businesses (especially banks) in the area.
3 - This year we implemented a "tiered donor" program. People like to be publicly recognized for their donations. For $1-$20 "Friend of the Show, for 20.01-50.00 Ensemble, 50.01-100.00 Crew member, (etc. etc.)
This year we were able to get about $1,500 this way.
4 - Chipin.com. We used chipin.com, a pretty neat web-based fundraising tool. I posted it on my blog and was able to earn $990.00.
5 - DVD Sales. We purchased the DVD license from MTI (75 bucks) so that we could legally produce and sell DVD's. We did all the collating and labeling of DVD's early, so that we could tape our thursday night show, and duplicate it so that it would be on sale for Friday's and Saturday's show. We sold $1,000 worth of DVD's just at the Friday and Saturday night shows alone ($20 a piece). Couple that with the pre-orders that we took from cast members and family, up to about $500 bucks more.
6 - T-Shirts. I used Imagemarket.com. We got black 100% cotton t-shirts, printing on both sides for about 9 or 10 bucks a shirt. Sold them for 16.00, and made a decent amount of money by selling them to the audience (not a big seller, but every little bit helps)

check out my blog where I highlight a lot of this info...
MHS Theater!

Email if you have any questions!